The ‘Mark Ward: As Seen On TV’ exhibition kicks off at the Kemistry Gallery in Shoreditch on the 11th August and runs until the 18th. The Private View is on Thursday the 11th from 6-9pm. It’s open to all so please join us for a drink and view Mark’s amazing new artwork.

Growing up in the 1980s England on a steady diet of imported US TV shows, Saturday morning cartoons and drawing varsity logos from Channel 4’s NFL coverage, Mark developed an early fascination with the vivid, glazed Americana all these things invoked. As a teen his obsession only grew, through watching sun scorched concrete skate videos and reading the brightly coloured pages of Thrasher. Yearning to be totally immersed in this Californication, instead he was surrounded by the suburbs of London, grey skies, puddles and uneven paving slabs. As it dawned on Mark that this ideal world didn’t physically exist, the fascination with it, seen from his foreign perspective, did not leave his conscious.

As Seen On TV draws on all of those influences from Mark’s youth, but turns them on their head by superimposing glossy icons onto images of banal, everyday British scenes, acknowledging the superficiality of that Californication but celebrating the nostalgia and also clinging to a little bit of hope that it might still be possible to find it, somewhere out there.

Mark’s work not only uncovers the simple reality of everyday life, but creates a visual language that incorporates every candy wrapper, cartoon character and sun-bleached scene he believed in as a kid and packages them up in bright, shiny images.

The motif throughout is the idea of mesmerizing TV rays that transform unremarkable day-to-day situations into something desirable and glamorous, but at the same time the mix of Americana alongside British suburbia grounds the fantastical icons and shows them in a warts-and-all reality.